Automating Data Citation: The eagle-i Experience

Abstract

Data citation is of growing concern for owners of curated databases, who wish to give credit to the contributors and curators responsible for portions of the dataset and enable the data retrieved by a query to be later examined. While several databases specify how data should be cited, they leave it to users to manually construct the citations and do not generate them automatically. We report our experiences in automating data citation for an RDF dataset called eagle-i, and discuss how to generalize this to a citation framework that can work across a variety of different types of databases (e.g. relational, XML, and RDF). We also describe how a database administrator would use this framework to automate citation for a particular dataset.

Theory and practice of data citation

“…Davidson, Buneman, Deutsch, Milo, and Silvello () and Davidson et al () further formalized and extended this work for it to work with general queries for relational databases; they also highlight the technical relationships between data citation and provenance. In the same vein by exploiting database views, Alawini, Chen, Davidson, Portilho Da Silva, and Silvello () proposed a system for citing single RDF resources. They developed a working system tested for the Eagle‐i RDF data set, which creates automatic citation snippets for any RDF graph node, formats them in JSON and in a given human‐readable format, and maintains fixity thanks to an ad‐hoc RDF versioned data store.…”

“…A first RDF versioning system for RDF data sets is proposed in Alawini et al (2017) even though time queries are not explicitly handled.…”

“…There are some viable solutions for relational databases (Bohlen, Gamper, Jensen, & Snodgrass, 2009) that may require improvements from the efficiency viewpoint and an effective solution for XML (Buneman, Khanna, Tajima, & Tan, 2004) that needs to be extended to work with time queries, whereas RDF-based versioning requires a major methodological advancement to be usable with time queries (Geerts, Unger, Karvounarakis, Fundulaki, & Christophides, 2016) in the data citation context. A first RDF versioning system for RDF data sets is proposed in Alawini et al (2017) even though time queries are not explicitly handled.…”

Automating Software Citation using GitCite

“…In order for recommendations concerning data and software to be effective, we believe that systems must be developed to automate citations and deliver them along with the data or software products being extracted. In prior work, we have developed techniques for delivering citations to data extracted by queries from structured datasets [5,6,16]; in this work we turn to the problem of software.…”

Data citation and the citation graph

“…& Silvello, 2018;Wu, Alawini, Deutch, Milo, & Davidson, 2019) and graph databases(Alawini, Chen, Davidson, Portilho Da Silva, & Silvello, 2017).Overall, most approaches do not consider the evolution of data and the fact that databases are not monolithic objects. When those features are considered, some of the existing models propose the trivial solution of treating databases and views as stand-alone objects.…”